In the last installment of this series I discussed the basics behind how a strong palate is a liberated palate and encouraged laypeople to undertake what may seem on the surface as a thoroughly academic endeavor. I hope I made my argument convincing enough for you to believe that this is not necessarily so. Like true academia, knowledge goes a long way to further happiness. Our potential pleasure boost from a small amount of effort makes such an undertaking well worth while.

The main thing you need to ask yourself is how much is too much...or too little? It’s largely a personal question. The litmus test for the qualification can be explained simply, I think. If you find yourself focusing on the brain and paper work so much that the primal and sensual pleasure of the experience is getting dulled or obscured, then you may need to step down a notch and consider drinking a First Growth right off the neck, tasting notes be damned. Or maybe pouring some wine on a willing partner and study the effects of body chemistry on wine for awhile. On the other hand, if you’re having a hard time distinguishing the tart cherry from the black cherry that your friends are talking about and you feel they’re making it up, you might need to devote yourself a little more to the deliberate strengthening of your palate.

It’s of the utmost importance to remember that our goal is pleasure and richness of the senses. Like a good relationship or a nice bottle of wine to a vintner, patience and some hard work are required. But in our labors we must never lose sight of the fact that we’re doing this for us—to make our lives richer and more enjoyable.

 The ocean of the mind

Becoming a good wine writer is not our primary goal, but good wine writing has an intimate symbiotic relationship with healthy wine enjoyment. Articulation is really the underlying force at work here. Since it’s silly to articulate your thoughts into the lonely chasm of your mind, why not write them down? As an armchair psychologist, I would like to think that much of what our subconscious does is sub- or super-verbal. Our deeper minds think in broad strokes of complexly interacting colors and sounds. There is no language adequate enough to express this beautiful tide of thought. Now,  the act of attempting to attach language to these thoughts doesn’t make them static, but simply highlights them—makes our verbal literal mind focus on the ineffabilities of the deeper mind. I might be gilding the lily here, but the idea is not to describe, but to evoke.

Primarily, tasting notes are notes to yourself. They are cues of evocation. We want to accurately frame a sort of index image of one of those deeper thoughts or experiences. So, upon returning to our notes we can hopefully cue our deeper mind and our senses to re-experience or re-imagine what it did before when we had the wine in front of us. As with recording dreams, it’s necessary to strike while the iron is hot, because the next tidal phase of the mind is hot on the heels of the last and will surely wash away the previous impressions in the sand.  It’s enough of a challenge as it is, but add the intoxicating effects of our favorite drink and the window of opportunity becomes even narrower.

Once we have served our duties to ourselves and accurately formed our verbal impressions of the non-verbal sensations, then and only then we get the added bonus of communicating to others. It is in this amazing act that we can see what really binds us. What we have is a rich sensory input, the wine, which is a constant. It tastes the way it tastes and presents the same chemical signal to each person. Like dropping the same stone into many and variously-shaped ponds, we highlight the differences in the ponds’ qualities by observing the differing ripple patterns. Likewise, if a group of people has attained a small ability to articulate, they are reporting the way our stone, this wine, is rippling around in their senses and their minds. Then we see the commonalities. When another person can evoke in you one of those deeper thoughts or sensations, they are achieving one of the highest levels of communication we can experience. They are sharing thoughts and entire mindsets with you for a brief moment in time. And this is only one of the many profound effects of this, our magical drink.

Evoking the ocean

One of the reasons I wrote this article was to help people understand that the reviews given by most critics are not at all similar to the tasting notes we write to ourselves then share with others. For those of you familiar with (or perhaps soiled by) these reviews, we should consider them sort of technical data with little to no ability to evoke the sensations you might be able to expect should you try the wine yourself. These reviews and reviewers are purposely devoid of most evocative kinds of language. In their ignorance, they are considered “objective” when the very nature of what we are trying to do with this project is almost the opposite. How drinking wine got confused with journalism or, laughably, scientific objectivity is way beyond me. For now let’s forget those people exist, even though, believe it or not, there is some use that can be derived from their kind of writing—surely a topic we can return to some other day. For now let’s pretend we’ve just invented jotting down our thoughts and impressions of wine.

Dirty mouths

So I’ve talked in pretty lofty terms here and maybe some of you have gotten lost in such talk. Maybe I’ve lost myself. The pillars of all that lofty language are easy enough to understand, so let’s start there.

Happily, there is a new generation of wine enthusiasts. They are young (or at least young at heart), inventive, and most importantly, not interested in the more elitist aspects of wine enthusiasm. It is sort of en vogue amongst this new set (among whom I’d like to count myself) to suggest that you do some goofy-sounding things like stuffing dirt in your mouth, or, less-goofily, conducting tastings of fruits commonly embodied in wine. There are even now candies made to evoke the sensation of drinking wine. While much of this borders on kitsch, I have to say that they breathe a refreshing air of irreverence into these stuffy and hallowed halls. That being said, I want readers to know that we need only take things to such extremes if it fits our personalities. Stuffing a sweaty sock in your mouth on a late night talk show is not a required activity. Though if you are brave enough to do so you certainly have our attention.

Most of those activities, as goofy as they may seem, have as a common goal that of getting drinkers to be more aware of the rich world of flavor and aroma around them. Outsiders sometimes balk at wine enthusiasts talking about wine almost completely in terms of things that are not wine. But that’s a major part of the charm. We are so amazed that a singular fruit can evoke so much and so accurately sense experiences from the non-wine world that we cannot help but coming back again and again. If you are not talking in this sort of parallel language, then you are missing the point, it seems to me. Any attempt to break down wine flavors and aromas in terminology that only refers to wine would have to be overly scientific and dry in nature.

I think it is true that everyone that is of legal drinking age has already stored a repository of sense experience. Most of us have had raspberries on more than a few occasions. For this reason I don’t think it’s of the utmost importance to conduct raspberry tastings—though such things can certainly be fun in their own right. Again, the importance here is paying more attention to our senses on an day to day, minute to minute basis. Next time you put strawberries on your cereal note how the berries, milk, and grain interplay on your palate. All you have to do is pay attention and devote your concentration to your palate for a moment’s time. Such experiences may not end up relating to your wine enthusiasm, but you are richening your sensory life in general and that cannot be bad. If you go out of your way just a little to taste things you never had before, again you’re only the wiser for it. Relating to wine, it’s often fun to go out and either smell or taste (or both) the more obscure sounding things that are common currency among wine writers—such as leeches nuts or freshly-laid asphalt. It’s fun because sometimes we find out some pretty wild sense experiences are represented in wine, and other times we see that some very commonly used expressions are totally bunk.

We are lucky that the sensations associated with our palate (primarily taste and smell) are so strongly linked with memory. It is this relationship that makes what we are doing so strongly evocative. So, when you finally do sit down to your evening glass alone or with friends, open up the channels of memory and let your relative mind equate what you’re drinking to what you already know. If you’re working to both expand what you know of taste and aroma sensations in parallel to trying to equate those things to what you’re drinking your wine appreciation powers increase tenfold. A little really does go a long way.

Now, after all that when you decide to put pen to paper, hopefully all these relationships will write themselves. There are other more technical things we’re looking for when we’re experiencing both wine and non-wine things, but we’ll leave the more technical things to the last installment of this series.

Buttered toast with strawberry jam

When I was a kid, I used to spend an occasional weekend night over at my grandparents’ house. This was my father’s side of the family and they’re much more on ceremony than my mother’s. I would wake in the morning and my grandmother would always have everything laid out for us. Neatly folded napkins with a vitamin pill sitting on top, a glass of fresh juice, and freshly buttered toast. My grandmother, you see, is a butter fanatic. Everything that has bread has butter in one form or another. Ham and cheese, turkey on rye…all on buttered bread. So, even if you wanted toast with jam there was some melted butter along for the ride. Now toast, butter, and jam are actually pretty friendly flavors and of course the richness and the sweetness were quite alluring to a young palate.

A few years ago I was tasting a Carneros Pinot Noir at the winery. It was a young wine and, thank god, varietally correct. It had a beautiful almost glowing light red color. As was the style of the times, some of the oak that the wine came in contact with was new and toasted—lightly charred by fire on the inside. While the wine was young and light, it was beautiful and well balanced. I remember first putting my nose in it and I was instantly transported to that younger me at my grandmother’s house—in my pj’s, sitting at the table with bedhead hair trying to chomp down breakfast so I could get to weekend cartoons. For there in the glass was buttered toast lightly spread with strawberry jam. It was all there and perfectly complete.

Many of my companions at the tasting didn’t think much of the wine. Perhaps it was too delicate at a time when many California Pinot Noirs want to be much broader. Perhaps they never had a grandmother that served them buttered toast with strawberry jam. I don’t know but the beauty of my enjoyment of the wine almost flowed directly from the fact that it was intimately personal. I related my experience to one of the assistant winemakers there and she instantly smiled at me. She “got it” even though I’m sure her experiences with buttered toast with strawberry jam were different. We nonetheless made a connection much deeper than the wine and much deeper than buttered toast with strawberry jam. We shared a sense experience, raw and unadulterated. There really is no substitute for that.

Now there are technical reasons to why those particular flavors came out of that particular wine, but we shouldn’t burden ourselves with those now. For now, we are simply using wine as a gateway to memories past and maybe future. We are also using these new gateways to connect with others in a more socially pleasing way, expanding our pleasure exponentially.